Peace River Bones

9 posts in this topic

TourmalineGuy 4

Will the ever generous fossil forum grant me another wish and give me some advice on the following fossils?

I know they're not all identifiable (probably #2 and maybe #3), but I do have some questions.

These are all from the Peace River of Florida, so they can be Miocene Marine or Miocene-Pleistocene Land. Or at least that's the most likely, who knows, #1 looks suspiciously like a trilobite... (<---this means I'm just kidding)

Onto the fossils:

#1: I am posting this one because both sides have a ring on them, its in pretty bad shape. I thought at first it may be a vertebra, but it doesn't look like any I know or have seen. Plus, the disk-shaped sides aren't nearly as regular as most vertebra. Any ideas out there?

#2: This is almost certainly an osteoderm or scute, but I don't have great references and I can't figure out exactly to what... The pattern looks a lot like turtle shell, but I haven't seen a piece quite like this.

#3: This little bone is half complete. It is very flattened towards the broken end.

#4: A hollow bone! Is this a bird bone? I know plenty other fossilized bones can be hollow too... perhaps some insight into telling the differences in your average, half-destroyed fossil?

Well that's it, enjoy the fossils. I'll probably have another batch in a couple weeks as I weed through my Peace River scraps.

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tracer 34

#1 has dished-out side morphology that is reminiscent to me of the structure of an astragalus. not enough there to really say that, but i'm just thinking out loud. #3 looks turtley to me in the morphology. number last seems like it's got the shape of say a deer metapodial diaphysis. don't know. hopefully you take wild guesses under advisement.

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TourmalineGuy 4

And, yes, I take your wild guesses under advisement. But, I do appreciate them; wild guesses provide a great starting point for further research.

And, now that I compare #1 to my deer astragalus, it matches fairly closely, if properly oriented, to one half of it. Although it is roughly 50% larger in the dimensions, so its might be part of a camel/llama astragalus... Even that might be puts my inquisitive soul partially at rest. Thanks for the wild guess.